The “must read” on the Tea Party

Sometimes Matt Taibbi really overdoes it on things, but this Rolling Stone article on the Tea Party is Taibbi at his bet. Most (though definitely not all) of his analysis strike me as pretty accurate, but more than anything, this will probably be the most entertaining thing you read on the Tea Party. Here’s some good stuff:

A hall full of elderly white people in Medicare-paid scooters, railing against government spending and imagining themselves revolutionaries as they cheer on the vice-presidential puppet hand-picked by the GOP establishment. If there exists a better snapshot of everything the Tea Party represents, I can’t imagine it…

But after lengthy study of the phenomenon, I’ve concluded that the whole miserable narrative boils down to one stark fact: They’re full of shit. All of them. At the voter level, the Tea Party is a movement that purports to be furious about government spending — only the reality is that the vast majority of its members are former Bush supporters who yawned through two terms of record deficits and spent the past two electoral cycles frothing not about spending but about John Kerry’s medals and Barack Obama’s Sixties associations. The average Tea Partier is sincerely against government spending — with the exception of the money spent on them.

There’s plenty more that good. Go ahead, click though and read the whole thing. Seriously. You’ll be glad you did.